Nowhere else were Nazi atrocities as evident as in the death camps, where thousands of human beings became “live material.” RT interviewed people, who were no stranger to these realities – both liberators and those from behind barbed wire.

Seventy years have passed since the liberation of Auschwitz
concentration camp in Poland where over a million people died,
setting the date for the Holocaust commemoration. Yet, all the
recognized Auschwitz horrors, hidden behind the slogan
“Arbeit macht Frei” (“Work makes free”) –
soul-sucking slave labor, cruel medical experiments and gas
chambers – weren’t the only means of torturing those whom the
Nazis deemed inferior.

Ozarichy concentration camp in Belarus had people from various
Slavic nationalities collected behind barbed wire in a closed
forest area. Its less known story has been told by one of its
liberators, WWII veteran Irina Gryzova who is now 87 years old.

Soviet reconnaissance groups found its “unspeakable
horror” by accident in the winter of 1944. As many as 33,000
people were lying on the frozen ground deliberately infected with
typhus, she says. The Nazis used the civil population as a hook
to spread the disease to the enemy army.

Gryzova recalls: “The Germans expected, they were sure, that
we won’t leave our own people in times of need, that we would
certainly help them. And that’s what happened. We evacuated
them.”

“No matter what situation people find themselves in, even the
most extreme and horrible living conditions, death every day, and
every hour the fear of death, they still remained human. They
kept remembering, dreaming, writing poetry, composing songs and
singing those songs.”

And people, who were kept in many other concentration camps in
striped robes with their names erased and substituted by numbers,
had to remain strong and hopeful inside in order to survive.

“Twice I was beaten up, twice I was sentenced to death. The
tortures I endured were operations without anesthesia. It was
common practice there,” said Eduard Zimovets – survivor of
Sachsenhausen concentration camp in northeast Germany. He was
sent to the camp at the age of 15, lost nearly all his teeth, but
upon being freed he “literally on the second day” joined
a tank brigade that liberated the prisoners.

Another camp survivor Nina Lych, who was brought to Auschwitz at
the age of two and is now 76 years old, recalls that that the
horrors began “when they started taking children from their
parents.” She lost her mother with her last memory of her
being “the human hand – tender, warm touch.”

Lych describes some medical experiments that were conducted in
the camp. “We were given injections and pills. It was Dr.
Mengele, he was the executioner, later called the Angel of
Death,” she said. “They dipped people into tanks
containing some liquid – their bodies would burst apart. Then
they’d be taken and dipped into another tank – the bodies would
start to heal.”

Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp was liberated in January
1945, and Victor Ognev, 89, who was a T34 tank driver and
mechanic, recalls that day:

“There was no one behind the gate. The place was empty. The
prisoners were all locked up inside the barracks, as the Germans
were ready to exterminate them.”

Later, the largest concentration camp complex, in Poland, became
a museum that conducts research in the Holocaust, the genocide of
6 million Jews by the Nazi regime.